On Fox News a couple of Sundays ago, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that the Republican National Committee (RNC) falsely claims that illegal immigration is causing an increase in crime. Buttigieg argued that crime rates decreased under President Biden and increased under President Trump, questioning why America would want to return to higher crime rates under Trump.
To get this out of the way at the outset, on the question is immigration and crime, and the oft-heard claim that immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crime, the fact is that native-born status for immigrants is wrongly assigned in the data. Determination of a detainee’s citizenship or immigration status by police is not universally standardized and depends on a variety of local laws, policies, and practices.
If police officers make a determination of immigrant status it typically occurs during the booking process after an arrest. However, the frequency with which police make this determination, whether during the investigation or during booking, varies widely. Officer discretion plays a role, as officers may decide whether to inquire about immigration status based on the situation and their judgment. Departmental guidelines and jurisdictional policies play a role; some localities, often referred to as “sanctuary cities,” limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities and may not routinely ask about immigration status. The nature of the crime affects determination, as well; for more serious crimes or when there is suspicion of immigration violations, police may be more likely to determine a detainee’s immigration status.
As a result, in statistics showing immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans, many of those who are identified as native-born are actually immigrants whose immigration status was not determined and recorded at the point where it would show up in the statistics.
As for whether crime has decreased or increased, there are several factors to consider. But we should make sure to note that the perception of Americans is that it has increased. A Gallup survey from November of last year showed that 92 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats believed crime was rising. Rasmussen Reports surveys from March last year to April this year consistently found that around sixty percent of Americans think violent crime is getting worse, with many more people believing crime is increasing rather than improving. This perception is not driven by corporate media reports of rising crime. Some of it is driven by engagement with social media where videos of crimes in progress are numerous. Some of it is driven by personal experience.
Corporate media personnel have an understanding of what readers are about to learn from Freedom and Reason, which is the crime is a real problem in America today, but they tell their audiences that popular perception is wrong. Their function here is not informing the populace but gaslighting them, telling them that they do not see what they see. Public perceptions are not mistaken. There’s something wrong with the statistics.
When police budgets are cut, arrest rates drop, and people stop reporting crimes, John Lott explains in the “The Truth about the Crime Explosion,” in National Review, crime statistics may appear better even as disorder increases. Many Americans can see for themselves that stores like CVS and Walgreens now keep products behind locked glass, which is inconvenient and costly for the stores—so it must be necessary. This was not the case a few years ago. But violent crime has also increased. In what follows I will be relying on Lott’s NR article, as it is very thorough and well argued (as his arguments are). Because NR is behind a paywall, I will summarize Lott’s reporting and analysis here. See his article if you can. This will be a close paraphrase. I will follow up in the coming weeks with my own analysis, but the time to focus on this issue is now, and Lott has made a vital contribution to our understanding. I don’t want to miss any of it.
Those claiming crime is falling rely on the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which only counts reported crimes, not total crime. Additionally, the FBI’s crime measurement has significant flaws. For readers unfamiliar with crime statistics, there are two major crime measures: the FBI’s NIBRS counts reported crimes, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) asks about 240,000 people each year if they have been victims of crime. Since 2020, these measures have been negatively correlated. The FBI reports fewer crimes while more people report being victims. In fact, the FBI reports fewer than half of the same Index crimes reported to the NCVS—and the gap appears to be growing.
This discrepancy arises because law enforcement has weakened, Lott argues. When people believe criminals won’t be caught, they are less likely to report crimes. This is a function of depolicing. Comparing the five years before COVID-19 with 2022, the percentage of reported urban violent crimes resulting in an arrest dropped from 44 percent to 35 percent. In cities with over a million people, arrest rates fell from 44 percent to 20 percent, an unprecedented decline in FBI data. In 2022, in large cities, only eight percent of all violent crimes (reported and unreported) and one percent of all property crimes resulted in an arrest (not all arrests lead to charges, prosecutions, or convictions). Between 2015 and 2019, the arrest rate for murders in large cities fell by 38 percent, for rapes by 50 percent, for aggravated assault by 55 percent, and for robberies by 58 percent.
Since 2020, FBI reported crime and NCVS total crime have diverged. In 2022, the FBI reported a two percent drop in violent crime, whereas the NCVS showed a 42 percent increase, the largest one-year rise in violent crime ever recorded by the NCVS. The increase over 2020 was even greater. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally moved together, but from 2020 to 2022, they were almost perfectly negatively correlated. As one measure rose, the other fell. In 2021 and 2022, the FBI reported a two percent decrease in reported violent crimes, while the NCVS showed increases of 14 percent and 29 percent. This inconsistency raises doubts about the FBI data.
The decline in reported crimes by police departments after a new reporting system was introduced in 2021 partly explains the discrepancies. In 2022, 31 percent of police departments, including those in Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI, and another 24 percent only partially reported. This is an improvement over 2021 but still much worse than the 97 percent of agencies reporting in 2020. The FBI also undercounts crimes in cities like Baltimore and Nashville. There are no 2023 numbers reported in Crime Data Explorer (CDE), the FBI’s dash-boarding system, at all.
Downgrading crimes by police departments also contributes to the drop in FBI numbers. Classifying aggravated assaults as simple assaults, which are excluded from FBI violent crime data, is one example. Progressive district attorneys nationwide are downgrading felonies to misdemeanors (while the upgrades misdemeanors to felonies in the hush money case prosecuted against Donald Trump). For instance, Manhattan’s DA downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60 percent of the time, with 89 percent of those downgraded to misdemeanors. Chicago has also misclassified murders as noncriminal “death investigations.” Moreover, police numbers declined due to budget cuts and retirements, departments stopped responding to nonemergency 911 calls. Instead, people had to go to the police station to report crimes. A crime officially counts only when police make out a report.
Concerning the most serious of crimes, murder, murder rates, which dropped by 13 percent in 2023, are still 7 percent above 2019 levels. The NCVS doesn’t survey about murder, but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a measure that differs from FBI data: while the FBI shows murders peaking in 2020 and dropping in 2021 and 2022, the CDC shows murders peaking in 2021 and being higher in 2022 than in 2020.
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